Sharpness setting in Vegas Pro 10

[Robin Davies-Rollinson]

I think this has been touched on slightly before, but I'm wondering what exactly is going on with the sharpness effect in SV Pro 10?
If I add the effect, but keep it at "reset to none" ie, no sharpness, there is still a slight and not unpleasing sharpening of the image. Is this an inbuilt fault? Or is the norm not sharp enough and therefore needs the effect switched in all the time ( but switched to "none" as it were...?)

[Adam Stanislav]

Originally Posted by Robin Davies-Rollinson

If I add the effect, but keep it at "reset to none" ie, no sharpness

No sharpness? That does not make any sense. If you did not want any sharpening, you would not add the sharpen filter. Reset to none simply resets all the variables of an effect to their default values, but that does not necessarily mean no effect takes place.

After all, what would be the point of having the filter running and taking up both memory and time if you did not want it to change anything?

[Mike Kujbida]

Originally Posted by Adam Stanislav

No sharpness? That does not make any sense.

No it doesn't but for some reason known only to the original coder(s), that's the way Vegas does it.
This has been discussed numerous times on the Sony Vegas forum and, to the best of my knowledge, no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation.

[Robin Davies-Rollinson]

Thanks Mike, that was the point of my post: just what is going on?
Perhaps we'll never know, but it's interesting.

[Adam Stanislav]

Originally Posted by Mike Kujbida

No it doesn't but for some reason known only to the original coder(s), that's the way Vegas does it.

That is the way any individual plugin may or may not do it, even if that plugin was written by Sony and comes with Vegas. Vegas just does what the plugin tells it to do.

As I suggested, the reasoning most likely is that if you select a filter, you want it to filter. So even "none" still may do some minimal filtering. Calling it "reset to none" is a poor choice of words, "default" would make more sense. But Vegas certainly does offer a way to disable a filter altogether by unticking the checkmark in the list of all plugins used. If you do that, the filter is not even loaded to the memory and wastes no time running.

If you keep it ticked, Vegas loads the filter and runs the code in it. The coder probably figured you wanted to get something done as long as you are spending your time running the filter.

Not all coders are like that. For example, my own Dunaj plugin, if you tell it to do nothing, it does no filtering, but it still has to copy the input image to the output image, which is a total waste of time. But Vegas plugins have no way of telling Vegas they have been asked to do nothing (or if they do, I sure have not seen it in the plugin API). So it is not unreasonable, IMHO, if a coder figures that if you have included his filter in the effects chain, you probably want it to do at least some filtering. Given that Sony does not offer clear guidelines on the matter, every coder is left to decide on his own what to do in a situation like that.

[Mike Kujbida]

Adam, thanks for the explanation.
That made a whole lot of sense to me and I appreciate it.

[Adam Stanislav]

You're quite welcome.

[Ian Stark]

The reason a 'real' zero setting would be good is when keyframing changes over time. Personally I would like to see 'reset to none' MEANING 'reset to none' in ALL plugins.

0.00 should mean 0.00 in my book. When 0.00 = anything other than 'no effect', it becomes misleading.

I agree with you, Adam, that 'reset to none' is better described as 'default values' but even then a 'has no effect' position should be available - especially if you offer a 0.00 value on a slider!!

(IMHO, of course ;-) and argued as a result of a healthy intake of Peruvian pisco and coke).

EDIT: Coca Cola, that is.

[Adam Stanislav]

Originally Posted by Ian Stark

The reason a 'real' zero setting would be good is when keyframing changes over time. Personally I would like to see 'reset to none' MEANING 'reset to none' in ALL plugins.

No argument from me. Alas, as I said, Sony has not specified it, so not every plugin author thinks about it that way.

I would suggest a workaround for the keyframing the filters that do not have a true "none" version. It is more work, but the result should be the same.

Split the clip into three parts. The first part (let us call it A) is where you do not want any filtering. The second part (B) is where you want to do the gradual change. The third part (C) is where you want full filtering.

Duplicate the second part (let us call the copy B').

Rejoin the first and the second part (A+B) and mark the point where they used to be split (i.e., the start of B). Join the copy of the second part with the third part (B'+C).

Now you have two clips, with the end of one overlapping the start of the other. Apply the filter to the clip produced by joining the third clip with the copy of the second (B'+C). Move the start of the filtered clip (i.e., B') over the point you marked earlier (start of B), so what was the second part and the copy of the second part (B and B') are now overlapping exactly. Do a simple transition, fading from one clip (A+B) to the other (B'+C).

The result will be the same as if you keyframed the effect from none to full (or to whatever you want).

Perhaps someone who is good with scripting (which I am not) could write us a script to do it all automatically.

[Guy McLoughlin]

The Sony Sharpness plug-in has had this behavior for more than 5 years now. I've asked for this to be fixed since Vegas 7, but so far Sony have done nothing about it.

[Rob Wood]

I do a lot of scaling, but find the Sharpen filter at 0.000 sometimes too much, so I loaded Unsharp Mask, set the Radius to 0.001, left Threshold at 0.000, and tried various Amount values while comparing.

1) An Amount of 1.25 appears (by eye and Waveform monitor) to be close to what the Sharpen filter does at 0.000.
2) Lowering the Amount setting to between .250 and .500 while leaving Radius at 0.001 and Threshold at 0.000 works well; slight sharpening with no visible damage i could find by eye or scopes... anything below .250 was too subtle to be of use for me.

[Dale Guthormsen]

Adam, Rob,

Thank you for these work arounds and taking the time to share them!!!

This kind of thinkg saves hours of sorting this stuff out!!!

[Jeff Harper]

Yes, great stuff, thanks for sharing.